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Breakdown, Breakthrough

Name: Breakdown, Breakthrough
Author: Kathy Caprino

The Professional Woman's Guide to Claiming a Life of Passion, Power, and Purpose

Kathy Caprino

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237 pages
English
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eBook - ePub

Breakdown, Breakthrough

The Professional Woman's Guide to Claiming a Life of Passion, Power, and Purpose

Kathy Caprino

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About This Book

Helps professional women experiencing feelings of disempowerment and dissatisfaction regain the confidence, courage, and energy to take control of their livesIdentifies 12 crises professional women face today and offers specific advice and tools for overcoming themDraws on interviews with over one hundred women, offering inspiring stories and practical advice for addressing and resolving disempowermentThousands of professional women, though outwardly successful, find themselves in the midst of a crisis, believing that they've sacrificed meaning, fulfillment, and balance in their lives to achieve work-related success. Their lives feel unmanageable—and they are confused, blocked, overwhelmed and unable to move forward effectively. Kathy Caprino sheds light on this growing epidemic of disempowerment and shows women how to reinvigorate and reclaim their lives.Breakdown, Breakthrough uses a comprehensive coaching, behavioral, and spiritual framework to explore how women can restore their power and reconnect with their life visions as they awake from the paralysis of professional dissatisfaction and personal diminishment. Caprino outlines a new model for understanding disempowerment, one that focuses on women's relationships with themselves, with others, with the world, and with what she calls their higher selves. She identifies twelve specific challenges professional women face and offers concrete, practical advice for overcoming each one—helping readers "step back, let go of what is holding them back, and say yes" to creating a compelling and rewarding next chapter of life and work. This is also a deeply personal book. Caprino candidly discusses her own struggles with crippling feelings of disempowerment, and shares moving stories and heartfelt advice gleaned from her interviews with over one hundred women who experienced and overcame the crises she describes. Breakdown, Breakthrough offers working women who are stressed, stuck, and dissatisfied access to new inspiration, hope, and a definite plan of action.

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Information

Publisher

Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Year

2008

ISBN

9781605094205

Topic

Personal Development

Subtopic

Self Improvement

EMPOWERMENT WITH HIGHER SELF

13

Falling Together
After Falling Apart

Everything can be taken from a man but
one thing; the last of the human freedoms—
to choose one’s attitude in any given set of
circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

VIKTOR FRANKL
Man’s Search for Meaning

* STEP BACK TO EXPLORE A connection to struggle and to what no longer serves.

* LET GO of making excuses.

* SAY YES! to creating your new life as you want it.

* BREAKTHROUGH “I know what is important to me, and I honor it.”

* Theresa: Truthfully, I don’t talk much about my background and childhood because people just get overwhelmed about it, feel sorry for me, or see only the difficulties. But I really don’t view it that way. I believe that everything that’s happened to me has made me who I am, and I wouldn’t change any of it. The reality is that I was born to a mother who was imprisoned for being a con artist, and as a baby I was handed off to my mother’s sister. I suffered abuse in her home and was removed by the state. I was taken in by a series of foster homes for the next several years and was placed in my final adoptive home when I was 6. It was a small farm in Kansas, and I had a very modest upbringing. I worked all the time, and there was no TV, no playtime, no frills, nothing was wasted. Basically, if we didn’t grow it or kill it, we didn’t eat it. We were very poor, and certain days of the week we would have to go to the trash dumpster behind the grocery store to get our vegetables to eat.

Growing up, I had two very powerful role models—my adopted mother and grandmother. Both were very strong, resourceful women. To my mother, there was nothing that couldn’t be accomplished. Despite all that she was going through, I never heard her once complain or say, “Why is this happening to me?” She did what had to be done and worked from sun up to sun down. I learned so much from her. It’s funny, I tell my kids now, “I can rebuild your engine, change your oil, and milk a cow, but don’t ask me to do the Martha Stewart stuff.” My childhood was all about being resourceful, doing what had to be done, and wasting nothing. We were disciplined, always working.

I was lucky that I did experience love from my mother. She was as loving as she could be, given the fact that my adoptive father was terribly abusive to all of us. He spent time in prison for his abuse, and after prison, he committed suicide in a violent way. He set the house on fire and then shot himself to death. Even through that, my mother kept going, trying to be there for her five adopted children as best she could. She didn’t always succeed, but she did her best to be there for us.

Theresa’s childhood story is full of suffering, trauma, and hardship. But when you speak with her, sadness and pain are not the feelings that emerge. What you hear is courage, confidence, resilience, and hope. From all that she endured, she has become strong, independent—in short, a survivor. She refuses to be a victim of her past. Instead, she chooses to use all that she’s suffered to rise above her current situation and be a powerful vehicle for change. Her mother and her grandmother provided two courageous role models for fortitude and endurance. She witnessed firsthand every day what’s required to keep going in life despite crushing challenges. Theresa saw her mother and grandmother rise above their trials, showing an unshakable commitment to putting one foot in front of the other and being the best they could be for those who needed them.

Theresa’s Adult Crisis

In 1999, I had a deep personal crisis. Out of the blue, my husband of thirteen years simply walked out on me and our two children, who were 5 and 7 at the time. It was Valentine’s Day, and I remember he gave me two dozen roses in the morning, and by nighttime, he had left us, walked out, gone forever. I was absolutely shattered. I truly didn’t see it coming.

I had a job as a TV journalist, but my salary wasn’t nearly enough to take care of all our bills. For months I struggled, trying to earn enough money, be there for my kids, and hold things together, but everything was falling apart. It really did feel like a sort of death. Here was a person I loved and thought I’d be with for the rest of my life, who just bailed on us with no warning whatsoever. It was a horrific experience, and I went through a long period of great turmoil. I didn’t really come to until about a year and half later when I began to feel stronger and get the sense that I’d be okay. And with each passing year I felt stronger and stronger. But the key symptom for me during this time was that every problem, no matter how big or how small, from bald tires needing repair to my children crying, everything seemed so magnified, so larger than life. It was like, “I can’t bear this, too!” I couldn’t tolerate the crabby boss, the whining child who needed a nap. I just felt so overwhelmed by the simplest thing. I felt like, “I can’t take one more thing here.” Everything felt like too much.

As hard as it was, I realize now that this period, this traumatic experience, represents the seed for The Blessing Basket Project^®.

Theresa’s crisis of “everything falling apart” is typical—an enormous event occurs that shifts everything all at once. In this crisis experience, something you view as cataclysmic transpires so that nothing looks or feels the same as it once did. This shift, while deeply unsettling, can bring into focus the most important elements of who you are if you let it. It allows you to see more clearly what to let go of in order to move forward. This shift also brings into clearer view what you wish to be and do in this lifetime.

The Blessing Basket Project Is Born

During my period of crisis, people around me started sending me cards and letters of encouragement and support. I’d lay them out on the mantel and look at them frequently. Then one day, I collected them all and put them in a basket that one of these kind individuals had given me. It was a beautiful split-wood basket, and I started calling it my “blessing basket” because it was a place I kept all of these wonderful blessings from others. Other items began to find their way in there, too, like a piece of old tire from the time I couldn’t afford to buy new tires for my car, and I had decided to cash in my life insurance policy for the money. That day, a colleague at my office who knew what I was going through asked me, “Have you cashed in your policy yet?” I said, “Not yet. I’m going to do it tonight.” Then he handed me his credit card and said, “Don’t do it, Theresa. Go buy some tires and take care of anything else you need.” The kindness and generosity I’ve received from people, many of whom were strangers, still awe me. There was another time I simply couldn’t pay my monthly bills, and I got a phone call from a woman who said, “Hi, Theresa. My name is Ruth. You don’t know me, but I’ve been instructed to take care of your electric bill this month.”

These words and acts of kindness and love kept pouring in. At night, after a particularly hard day when the kids were in bed, I’d sit there with a cup of tea, desperately trying to figure how I’d get through another day, financially, emotionally—being a mother, a professional, taking care of all these responsibilities. I’d glance over and there’d be my blessing basket. I’d pore through it, reading the words of encouragement. I’d think, “Maria’s praying for me,” or “So-and-so gave me these groceries. I’ve got to go on. They’ve made an investment in me.” My basket kept me going. My crisis then reminded me of my mother’s experience when my father was sent to prison. I thought to myself, “I’ve got to survive this for the sake of my children,” just as my mother must have said about us.

As I started to feel stronger, I began teaching women’s groups about overcoming struggle and trauma, and how to survive it. In leading these workshops, I discussed my special blessing basket and what it did for me. Women all over found this concept very powerful and wanted to buy a basket for themselves. So I acquired some baskets from a neat woman in Arizona who imported them. As I sold them, I heard amazing stories about how these baskets helped women heal and survive their challenges. One woman came up to me and said, “My blessing basket got me through the death of my husband.” Another said, “I found a way to pay my bills thanks to this basket,” and so on. It was clear that this concept—gathering remembrances of one’s blessings in one spot and being reminded of the love and support that surrounds us—was changing people’s lives. I loved this idea but was bothered that the baskets I sold simply said “Made in China.” I realized I wanted to know who the individual maker was, and to bless the maker of the basket as well as the recipient.

As time went on, I realized too that I wanted to do something to help the world in a big way. My dream was to reduce world poverty. I was discussing my dream with a friend, and she said, “So, what’s stopping you?” What a powerful question that proved to be. I decided from that moment on that I needed to stop making excuses and do something. I asked her to help me be accountable, to stop making excuses for myself, and to take ...